Customer Reviews

Paranoid Park

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Alex, the narrarator and protagonist of "Paranoid Park", is not your typical romanticised culluloid teen. He is quiet, introspective, and near mute when it comes to verbalizing his feelings. He is the antithesis of a sullen, vapid adolescent skater. On the contrary, I found his parents to be vapid. When he speaks to them, what they say hardly makes an impact, because their efforts to really get through to him are ineffective. It's like carrying out an inane conversation with a stranger in which nothing is really said. Pleasantries are exchanged, but little beyond superficial subjects is broached.
The aftershock of a gruesome accident has left Alex shell-shocked. The entire film is about the way guilt haunts him like a shadowy executioner. Close-ups of his friends' faces emphasize the way he searches their expressions for the slightest hint of accusation. Alex lives in a world that offers little joy. His parents are getting divorced, and he has dislocated himself to the lonely confines of a journal. The journal is his confidante, his only witness to paralyzing emotions that stalk him during his waking hours.
Alex's character is not glorified in any way. He is awkward like most teens, he is not an expert skateboarder, and is reluctant to venture down the concrete slopes of the skate park carved under a colossal bridge. He is drawn toward Paranoid park because he seeks something resembling companionship and family. Jumping a boxcar leads to a fatal and grisly accident. Alex must live with the consequences of this mistake, which leads to intriguing questions about morality and the complexities of unintentional manslaughter. Gus Van Sant is not interested in the cogs of the judicial system, however, he is interested in the tormented machinery ticking away inside the young skater's head. Every aspect of reality is overshadowed by shame.
A scene in which Alex dissociates in a hot shower was compelling because every part of his body seemed to be weeping, except for his eyes, as if they were afraid to betray his secret. He wanders through gloomy rooms, turning on lights almost as an afterthought. When he has sex with his girlfriend, he does so in a stupor. Immediately afterward, she gets up and brags to her friend on the phone that it was "fantastic". To Alex it did little to penetrate the numbness soaking his body. A nimble detective questions him in a way that makes him suspect if he is found guilty, a vast nothing will swallow him. Faces and eyes and vague gestures judge him at every opportunity. Bizarre music in the background informs us that Alex is supposed to be feeling happy or sad, but his facial expression remains flat; incapable of smiling.
Gabe Nevins is an expressive actor who captures Alex's blank affect perfectly. He has an extremely difficult task in trying to capture Alex's mental state through posture and facial expressions, rather than simple words. His relationships with family and friends are so meaningless he has no one to confess to, so he buries his suffering to keep from being injured by emotions that are unfamiliar and threatening. Many will complain that the film moves at a snail's pace, but I think this is intentional: the director is submerging us in Alex's psyche, his dread and depression making situations slog by as if mired in quicksand.

**** 2007. Based on Blake Nelson's Paranoid Park and written and directed by Gus Van Sant. 60th Anniversary Prize in Cannes in 2007. A young skateboarder kills by accident a security guard. During the next days, he will try to find a way to formulate his guilt-feelings. Another movie about American teens by one of the most important modern American directors. By mixing Super 8 and 35 mm footage, making space go to pieces with multiple cameras filming the same scene and time by adopting a non linear narration line, Gus van Sant doesn't choose the easy way to galvanize our curiosity. I thank him for that. Highly recommended.

I saw this film on a zone 2 DVD, collector edition, available at Amazon.fr.

There are 2 well known aggregate movie review sites, MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes that would give this film an average of 4 stars out of 5. (The NY Times review in particular is dead on, imho.) The 1 star "total bomb" reviews here are completely out of sync with accepted opinion of Paranoid Park.

Obviously, it's not for everyone. It is more for those that could appreciate Elephant or 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days than someone looking for an action skater flick. But it will go down as one of Gus Van Sant's best films in what is already a distinguished career. It's one of the most beautiful movies of recent years and the score and sound mixing is stupendous. But it takes some time and attitude adjustment to get into the flow with the film. It's well worth the time and almost demands multiple viewings.

As with Elephant, many of the young actors are novices at best. This is not a drawback at all. It only enhances the movie because the characters are so real.

Did I say it's one of the most beautiful films of recent years? Slow motion skaters, the train scene scored to a key passage from Beethoven's 9th, the shower scene, the beach, beautiful boys, beautiful girls, not so beautiful girls, losing ones virginity- all in beautiful slow motion scenes told out of sequence, often with no dialog and sometimes repeated to underscore certain points. Two signature Elliott Smith songs, played almost in their entirety, accompany two long and unedited shots of the title character to create two more memorable moments.

One of the best of 2007 and deservedly so...

Paranoid Park is Gus Van Sant's twelfth feature film, and the third in his recent films about disaffected youth. Adapted from a novel by Portland writer Blake Nelson and obviously inspired by Crime and Punishment, Paranoid Park follows the life Alex, a local skate punk who gets tangled up in a grisly accident.

The thin plot has Alex, played by Gabe Nevins, attracted to Paranoid Park, a skate park that was built illegally by punks, skaters, and other riff raff. Alex goes there one night alone, and is essentially picked up by some shady characters. Without spoiling anything, he does something terrible and spends the rest of the movie trying to cope, mainly by writing out what happened in a letter to one of his friends. Paranoid Park represents a place where Alex feels that he can belong. He expresses how much he's attracted to the type of people who skate there, and he yearns to belong to their subculture, yet he never manages to find his place.

His writing literally drives the plot, as what he's writing down in his letter is what we experience as an audience. The focus of Paranoid Park is decidedly insular. Built around a series of disorienting techniques like dialogue overlaid with music, one sided dialogues where the other person is either obscured or off camera all together, long takes of Alex walking alone with a musical backdrop, and close-ups of Alex's blank stare, Alex's inner life is shown as a sort of dreamy and hazy numbness. His disaffection and guilt is not really expressed very effectively even in his diary, and the visual techniques of the film serve as one of the only windows in to his mind set.

Just like Elephant and Last Days, Van Sant is concerned with the seemingly existential existence of modern young people. Not only is Alex not coping too well with his deed despite his journal confession, he's also not coping with his parents divorce, and not coping with his superficial and sexual forward girlfriend. He can't express himself at all. A breakdown of language is a well trodden theme in existential literature, and the characters in Paranoid Park don't do a whole heck of a lot of communicating. Particularly evident is Alex's trouble communicating with the females in his life. He can't talk to his mother, whose face isn't even seen except as a hazy outline, he can't talk to his girlfriend Jennifer and feels nothing towards her, or his friend Macy who urges him to open up, yet he can't bring himself to share his secret with her even if it would have helped. Alex doesn't share his feelings or what happened, and he ends up being a depressed and blank teenager who'll end up being a dysfunctional adult, just like his parents.

Paranoid Park works well as an experimental take on a Crime and Punishment style story about inner torment. Most of the actors were found on myspace with the exception of Taylor Momsen as Alex's girlfriend Jennifer, who surprisingly enough plays a sexual forward young girl on Gossip Girl. Nevins is good as Alex, who's main job is to act like a typical teenager and to show off a numbed exterior. The acting isn't stellar but it's authentic enough. There might be a bit too much of the solitary slow motion shots of Alex, and maybe a bit too much style or substance with all of the arty and experimental camera work. When Van Sant shows us the fifth or sixth slow motion walking shot of Alex overlayed with Elliott Smith or Nino Rota it got a little tiresome. The pace is also very slow, which might turn off some folks wanting a more driven plot.

This is Van Sant's best effort in a long time, and it's definitely worth seeing if you can tolerate a little introspection and a slow pace.

Paranoid Park could arguably be Van Sant's retelling of Dostoyevsky's seminal Crime and Punishment; it is an intimate examination of a murderer, and the undertaking of guilt and societal disconnect. It follows the memories of Alex, a high school skateboarder in Portland, as they are told to us through his narration; something is irking him, and he is using the power of the narrative story as a mode of catharsis. He describes a local skate park, an illegally built array of concrete structures known as Paranoid by the skater kids, as the Eden of his adolescent dreams; his aspirations entail acceptance among his boarding cohorts, and being deemed `good enough' for Paranoid.
We then find ourselves following Alex directly inside his memories, as we start jumping back and forth through time. But we learn what is causing Alex's guilt when he has an interrogation with the local police detective, Liu, and we discover that a security guard has been murdered. A scream briefly flits into the soundtrack, indicating a troubled connection in Alex's memory, and now we realize that he is involved in the killing.
What follows is a landscape of heavy emotion as the stream of Alex`s thoughts spill into the actual filmic form; the weight of Alex's conscious takes the form of a deconstructed linear narrative of storytelling, a rich soundscape that portrays the sea of the mind's noise, and punctuations of skateboarding kids (which we later find out are the audition tapes of the actors playing Alex and his friends). The people that fill Alex's life are interestingly realized characters; his best friend Jarrod, the mentor and cause of his downfall Scratch, his strangely `other' girlfriends Macy and Jennifer, and the aforementioned detective.

This is a film about memory, and therefore, about history and historiography of the self. Van Sant approaches 'remembering' from a very unique perspective in order to tell the story, harkening back to concepts De Certeau expressed about the telling of history. As Alex himself states, "I didn't do very well in creative writing, but I'll get this all on paper eventually." The narrative is fragmented; events are not placed in logical order on a linear timeline, scenes are frequently repeated in differing ways, and sequences are reconstructed with unraveling detail as the `plot thickens;' the entire movie functions as re-enacted pieces of thought. The opening presents this skewed vision of storytelling in showing our hero, Alex, beginning to write the story (the history) of the events at hand. And he is writing in pencil, which leaves room for error and correction; `rewriting.' But even the scenes of him writing the story we are seeing are situated along with the rest of the sequences as pieces of a larger memory; one has to wonder when, in fact, the 'present' of the film is. The film harkens to ideas we all struggle with over time: our remembering, our remembered.

From a thematically critical perspective, this is a film dealing with the concepts of narratological understanding; the idea that time is not linear, that it can be fragmented and non-sequential like memory and thought. It is an example of mannerist mise-en-scene; the style is not motivated by the subject matter, but in its own justification. And though not the first time dealing with these ideas, it is Gus Van Sant's finest approach, and it demonstrates the craftsmanship embodying his work.

The good: A character study of a stereotypical looking skateboard teenager who is anything but stereotypical. Rather Van Sant, conveys to us the boy is a critical thinker who understands people could possibly have careers for other reasons then for money (whereas his judges may not be so critical) in disagreement of his more immature friends, a lesson sometimes learned by some adults after financial enslavement and a need to make big money. With little words Van Sant also manages to show the teen has a conscious but also has him make the politically incorrect correct choice which saves him from doing an internship in a prison learning how to be a criminal.

The repetitiveness of Park's structure comes off as pretentious at times. For example, you get some plot followed by slow motion scenes over and over which felt like the film was trying to be arty for arts sake. However, this one slight negative could stand to be a positive if this structure and style manages to seep into the subconscious and is remembered whereas so many instantly awesome popcorn flicks are forgotten.

Just watched "Paranoid Park"!

Good story,good characters, really interesting "it could happen" type plot!

I wish it had explained things a little better at the end.

Gus Van Sant usually doesnt disappoint and doesnt here.

If you like this movie, check out "Elephant", its another Van Sant film and a good one!

Gus Van Sant is by far the most interesting director working today. He's good enough at making mainstream Hollywood movies (like To Die For, Good Will Hunting, Psycho, and Milk) to get funding to make the movies he really cares about, like Paranoid Park, "little" movies that are infinitely more interesting than the big ones. He's made use of Hollywood, but so far he hasn't shown any sign of selling out to Hollywood. After every blockbuster, he goes home to Portland and gets back to work.

Since he follows his own muse (and her alone) in making these little movies, it wouldn't matter if every reviewer here thought they were too slow or boring or pretentious, as a large number do. He obviously makes them to please himself and not any audience, so it's almost a coincidence if anybody else likes them. Fortunately, I'm one who does.

Every "real" Van Sant movie, from Mala Noche to Paranoid Park, is a fascinating invitation to see and hear and (best of all) feel his very personal, quirky, lyrical, surreal, usually gritty and always fascinating take on a tiny little corner of this very wide world. He doesn't care enough what any of us think about his work to make it more palatable. Thank God. Like a true creator, he does what feels right to him. The beauty in that approach is that it gives us access to something completely unique, unavailable anywhere else.

People who insist on being spoon-fed their entertainment in familiar packages tend not to like Van Sant's little independent movies, but those people have many other options. Neatly packaged, predigested entertainment in familiar formats is what Hollywood cranks out by the hundreds every year. For the rest of us, there are the few odd geniuses like Gus Van Sant, willing to share their vision untainted by the public's demands for entertainment. He keeps on making these quirky gems, and they are consistently challenging, brilliant and very distinctive. Nobody would ever mistake a real Van Sant movie for one from The Walt Disney Company.

Van Sant is at heart a painter, after all, not a writer, not a storyteller, not a teacher. He gives us an impression of a story, a glimpse into it, not a neatly sequential, fully wrapped-up and satisfying narrative. He never gives us all the facts or answers every question or ties up every loose end, and he rarely tells a story in chronological order. He never, ever thinks for us. He gives us a glimpse into an experience and leaves us free to get whatever we can out of it.

I'm not saying that Van Sant's movies are just free-associating, chaotic messes. Paranoid Park, for example, is beautifully if unconventionally structured. The ghastly "crime" is in almost the exact center of the movie, with the details and consequences weaving in and out around it in both directions like swirls in a whirlpool.

Like Van Sant's other independent movies (and like all truly great movies), Paranoid Park cannot be fully appreciated in one viewing, or even two or three. That may be one reason some people don't like them--you don't get up from the first viewing as satisfied as if you'd finished a good meal. If anything, you leave hungrier than when you started. Only the second or third time do you even begin to comprehend what you've seen, to appreciate how the various, disparate elements fit together into an emotionally coherent and powerful whole.

I'll give an example. One very unusual thing Van Sant does in Paranoid Park is use background music originally composed for somebody else's movie, in this case several of Nino Rota's 40-year-old themes from Fellini's Juliet Of The Spirits. That music often accompanies one of the long slow-motion scenes of Alex just walking that so many reviewers complain about.

When I was watching Paranoid Park the first time, I noticed that that music sounded familiar, and I liked it, but I didn't recognize what it was until I saw the end credits. So I thought a while about why Van Sant would do such a strange thing, and I started remembering Juliet, and seeing similarities between Juliet's story and Alex's, and how perfectly her music fitted his experiences, and so the second time it was like watching a whole new movie.

That's how great movies are supposed to be. If you get all there is to get the first time, it means there wasn't much worth getting.

I'm tempted to say that Paranoid Park is the best Van Sant movie yet, but that's just because it's the one that's freshest in my mind. I remember Mala Noche, or the River Phoenix scenes in My Own Private Idaho, or the long dolly shot in Last Days, and I have to rein myself in. So I'll just say that Paranoid Park is the latest little masterpiece in a string of little masterpieces that hopefully will keep growing between the blockbusters for a long, long time.

When he isn't busy making commercial movies for a mainstream audience ("Good Will Hunting," "Milk"), Gus Van Sant is out there toiling away on the fringes of American cinema, creating low budget, highly idiosyncratic works for a niche market ("Gerry," "Elephant," "Last Days").

In "Paranoid Park," which has been derived from the novel by Blake Nelson, Van Sant sets his sights on the skateboarding underclass of Portland, Oregon. Alex is a fairly typical angst-ridden teen, whose parents are in the process of getting a divorce and who finds little in life to ignite his passion beyond skateboarding. Yet, he is generally respectful of his elders and lacks the initiative even to be truly rebellious. Alex's life changes dramatically, however, when he inadvertently becomes involved with the death of a man not far from the local skater park where he and his buddy have just recently begun to hang out. The majority of the movie is focused on Alex's attempts to both maintain the secret of what he's done and cope with the overwhelming guilt caused by the incident.

Like many of Van Sant's movies, "Paranoid Park" is guaranteed to leave certain members of the audience cold, frustrated by its lapses into artiness and the deliberately amateurish nature of many of its performances. Yet, it is this very lack of commercial slickness that gives the movie its much needed air of authenticity. Alex's response to what he's done is wholly in accordance with the way we feel a real person caught in this situation would react. Nothing about this film feels forced or phony, and Gabe Nevins, with his appropriately understated performance as the troubled teen, engages our sympathy from the outset. Yet, at the same time, Van Sant's characters seem to move through life as if in a dream, emotionally detached from the world around them, an effect achieved, stylistically, through slow motion photography, a time-shifting narrative, and an eclectic musical score which includes snippets of Nino Rota's pieces from various of Fellini's more phantasmagoric films.

Without a whole lot of contrivance or fanfare, "Paranoid Park" presents a credible and haunting view of teenage life in America today.

*What if something so terrible happens that you can't tell anyone? Yet it's too much of a burden to keep to yourself? That's the dilemma facing teenaged Alex (Gabe Nevins) in the chillingly plausible, very realistic film Paranoid Park.

Alex is a normal kid, and an avid skateboarder. The crowd he hangs with are always chasing the next adrenaline thrill. One popular spot they congregate to hone their boarding skills is in a bad part of town they've nicknamed "Paranoid Park". Definitely not a hangout their parents would approve of, so they usually sneak off there when they're supposed to be at other places.

One fateful night when Alex was supposedly at a sleepover at his friend Jared's (Jake Miller) house, they were instead out boarding at Paranoid Park. Some friends brought up an extreme but dangerous alternative to boarding, called Train Jumping at the adjacent tracks. Yes, it's exactly what it sounded like, the thrill seekers were jumping onto moving trains and hitching short rides. But while they were doing this, a security guard at the tracks ends up dead.

What at first appears to be a tragic accident may be something more, and police are following up saying that it was foul play, and that it had something to do with the skateboarders.

Police officials relentlessly question all the teens, find out about the subculture and that particular bad-news bit of real estate. The one thing they suspect although they can't get any information from the closely knit group is that Alex may know more than he's letting on.

Through a series of flashbacks, we follow Alex's memories of the night and the guard's death, little by little, and the final pieces of the puzzle don't come together until the end. Not revealing anything more, I can tell you that the end sent chills down my very spine.

This was so real, so plausible it haunted me for days after seeing it. The storyline is strong, and deeply rooted in suspense. Definitely worth at least one watch.
Paranoid Park